Why internal ETH transfers are not in logs

Last updated: September 22, 2026

At a glance

What you see

A wallet received ether from a contract — its balance went up — but eth_getLogs finds nothing and the transaction's receipt has no entry for the transfer. The top-level transaction's value is 0 or goes to a different address.

Why this happens

Solidity uses logs "to implement events": a log exists only when code emits an event. Sending ether is a call with a value, which changes balances but emits no log of its own, and a receipt contains the logs generated during execution, not a list of calls. So an ether transfer made inside a contract — a withdrawal, a refund, a multisig payout — is invisible to eth_getLogs and receipts unless the contract also emits an event. Geth's callTracer "tracks all the call frames executed during a transaction", and each frame carries its type, from, to and value, which is where internal transfers show up.

What to do

1. Check whether the contract emits an event for the transfer; if it does, filter for that event instead of tracing.
2. Otherwise trace the transaction (debug_traceTransaction with the call tracer, or trace_transaction where available) and collect frames with a non-zero value.
3. For balance tracking without traces, compare eth_getBalance before and after the block — it shows that ether moved, not who sent it.

When this is not our problem

That value transfers leave no log is a property of the EVM on every chain that runs it, whoever operates the node, Triport included. Only tracing, or the contract's own events, can show them.